-
http://tcs.sagepub.com/Theory, Culture & Society
http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/28/7-8/188The online version of
this article can be found at:
DOI: 10.1177/0263276411423027 2011 28: 188Theory Culture
Society
Derek GregoryFrom a View to a Kill: Drones and Late Modern
War
Published by:
http://www.sagepublications.com
On behalf of:
Theory, Culture and Society
can be found at:Theory, Culture & SocietyAdditional services
and information for
http://tcs.sagepub.com/cgi/alertsEmail Alerts:
http://tcs.sagepub.com/subscriptionsSubscriptions:
http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints:
http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navPermissions:
http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/28/7-8/188.refs.htmlCitations:
What is This?
- Jan 12, 2012Version of Record >>
at University of British Columbia Library on September 3,
2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from at University of British
Columbia Library on September 3, 2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded
from
-
From a View to a KillDrones and Late ModernWar
Derek Gregory
Abstract
The proponents of late modern war like to argue that it has
become surgical,
sensitive and scrupulous, and remotely operated Unmanned Aerial
Vehicles
or drones have become diagnostic instruments in contemporary
debates
over the conjunction of virtual and virtuous war. Advocates for
the use of
Predators and Reapers in counterinsurgency and counterterrorism
campaigns
have emphasized their crucial role in providing intelligence,
reconnaissance
and surveillance, in strengthening the legal armature of
targeting, and in
conducting precision-strikes. Critics claim that their use
reduces late modern
war to a video game in which killing becomes casual. Most
discussion has
focused on the covert campaign waged by CIA-operated drones in
Pakistan,
but it is also vitally important to interrogate the role of
United States Air
Force-operated drones in Afghanistan. In doing so, it becomes
possible to see
that the problem there may not be remoteness and detachment but,
rather,
the sense of proximity to ground troops inculcated by the video
feeds from
the aerial platforms.
Key words
armed conflict j killing j military j scopic regimes j
virtuality j war
Virtuous War
ADVANCEDMILITARIES like to boast that their conduct of war
hasbecome surgical, sensitive and scrupulous (Gregory, 2010a).
Thedevelopment of a precision-strike capability, the cultural
turntowards a counterinsurgency that places the local population at
the centreof its operations, and the refinement of the legal
armature that regulatesarmed conflict have all contributed to the
celebration of what Der Derian(2009) calls virtuous war. At its
heart, he argues,
j Theory, Culture & Society 2011 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London,
NewDelhi, and Singapore),Vol. 28(7-8): 188^215DOI:
10.1177/0263276411423027
at University of British Columbia Library on September 3,
2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from
-
is the technical ability and ethical imperative to threaten and,
if necessary,actualize violence from a distance ^ with no or
minimal casualties. Usingnetworked information and virtual
technologies to bring there here innear-real time and with
near-verisimilitude, virtuous war exercises a com-parative as well
as strategic advantage for the digitally advanced. Alongwith time
(as in the sense of tempo) as the fourth dimension, virtualityhas
become the fifth dimension of US global hegemony. (2009: xxi)
And at the heart of the ascent of war from the virtual to the
virtuousare the drone wars being waged by the USA in the global
borderlands.1
Two qualifications are immediately necessary. First, remotely
pilotedaircraft have been used since the First World War, assault
drones weredeployed in the closing stages of the Second World War,
and the firstmajor combat use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)
was during theVietnamWar, so there is a considerable history behind
todays remote oper-ations in the borderlands. There it intersects
with the exercise of a pro-foundly colonial modality of air power.
The British invented aerialcounterinsurgency on the North West
Frontier with Afghanistan and inIraq (Mesopotamia) in the 1920s
(Omissi, 1990; Satia, 2008, 2009), and forall the technical
advances there are numerous dispiriting parallels betweenthen and
now. Perhaps the most telling is the repeated insistence that
airattacks are counterproductive. Two commentators closely
identified withthe new US counterinsurgency doctrine insist that
expanding or even con-tinuing the drone war [in Pakistan] would be
a mistake. They explain:
While violent extremists may be unpopular, for a frightened
populationthey seem less ominous than a faceless enemy that wages
war from afarand often kills more civilians than militants. . . .
[E]very one of these deadnoncombatants represents an alienated
family, a new desire for revenge,and more recruits for a militant
movement that has grown exponentiallyeven as drone strikes have
increased. (Kilcullen and Exum, 2009)
Colonel F.S. Keen said much the same of the bombing of Pashtun
vil-lages on the North West Frontier in 1923: By driving the
inhabitants ofthe bombarded area from their homes in a state of
exasperation, dispersingthem among neighbouring clans and tribes
with hatred in their hearts atwhat they consider unfair methods of
warfare, he wrote, these attacksbring about the exact political
results which it is so important in our owninterests to avoid,
viz., the permanent embitterment and alienation of thefrontier
tribes (Keen, 1923: 400; see also Roe, 2008).
As my parallel suggests ^ and this is the second qualification ^
themodern debate has focused on the covert war waged by
CIA-operateddrones in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of
Pakistan. The cam-paign was initiated by President George W. Bush
in 2004, and by the endof 2008 there had been 46 strikes directed
at killing so-called High ValueTargets. The attacks were ramped up
by Obama, and by the end of 2010
Gregory ^ From a View to a Kill 189
at University of British Columbia Library on September 3,
2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from
-
there had been another 170 strikes.2 These operations raise
complex andtroubling legal questions, not least because the United
States is not at warwith Pakistan. On one side are those who defend
the strikes as limited andlegitimate acts of self-defense against
attacks from the Taliban who seeksanctuary across the border and
also as an effective counterterrorism tacticagainst al-Qaeda.
Indeed, Anderson describes perfect war, the verysummit of virtuous
war, as target selection perfected to the point of assas-sination,
a doctrine for which drones have become the weapon of choice(the
only game in town, according to the Director of the CIA) (see,
forexample, Anderson, 2009; Paust, 2009). On the other side are
critics whoinsist that such targeting, however precise, amounts to
extra-judicial kill-ing, and that if civilian agencies like the CIA
conduct military operationsthen their agents become unlawful
combatants. Their objections also fastenon the spatiality of the
war zone: they draw special attention to the impreciselegal
delineation of the global battlespace invoked by the United
Statesand to the lack of accountability for civilian casualties
(see, for example,OConnell, 2009; Rogers, 2010; Solis, 2010). But
for the most part all thesearguments assume that the use of UAVs by
the United States Air Force(USAF) and its military allies in
Afghanistan ^ including Britain andCanada ^ is unproblematic, and
in doing so they reinforce the claim thatthese new technologies
enable advanced militaries to conduct virtuouswar. This article
seeks to interrogate those assumptions, but I have to notethat it
is not easy to disentangle one campaign from the other. Some
com-mentators have suggested that the USAF is involved to varying
degrees inthe CIA strikes, but in any case the Air Force uses the
Pentagons JointIntegrated Prioritized Target List to conduct its
own strikes on leaders ofthe Taliban and others who may have only a
proximate relation to the warin Afghanistan, and makes no secret of
the fact that a prime function ofits Predators and Reapers is to
put warheads on foreheads (Mulrine, 2008)(Figure 1).3
I cannot adjudicate these questions here, and my own focus is on
thescopic regime through which drone operations take place. Metz
(1982: 61)proposed the term to distinguish the cinematic from the
theatrical way ofstaging and seeing the world, but it has since
been uncoupled from any spe-cific forms, displays and technologies
to denote a mode of visual apprehen-sion that is culturally
constructed and prescriptive, socially structured andshared (see
also Jay, 1988; Somaini, 2005^6). Like its companion termvisuality,
meaning culturally or techno-culturally mediated ways ofseeing, the
concept is intended as a critical supplement to the idea ofvision
as a purely biological capacity (I say supplement because
theembodiment of vision remains of more than incidental
importance). Scopicregimes are historically variable, and different
regimes can coexist withina single cultural and social formation,
but the closest attention has beenpaid to the ligatures between
visuality and modernity. Apart from a handfulof studies, however,
of which Virilios War and Cinema (1989) is probablythe best known,
little systematic attention has been given to the ways in
190 Theory, Culture & Society 28(7-8)
at University of British Columbia Library on September 3,
2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from
-
which the conduct of modern wars is mediated by scopic regimes.
Here toothe air wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan may converge; so
too do the linesof defence and attack. Those who defend the drone
wars insist that thenear real-time video-feeds from the aircraft
allow an unprecedented degreeof precision and a carefully
calibrated response that can minimize civiliancasualties. Those who
criticize these operations are concerned that killingat such a
distance becomes too casual and that late modern war has
beenreduced to a video game. This too has a history, of course, and
Chow(2006: 35) argues that:
War can no longer be fought without the skills of playing video
games. Inthe aerial bombings of Iraq the world was divided into an
above and abelow in accordance with the privilege of access to the
virtual world. Upabove in the sky, war was a matter of maneuvers
across the video screen byUS soldiers who had been accustomed as
teenagers to playing video gamesat home; down below, war remained
tied to the body, to manual labor, tothe random disasters falling
from the heavens.
To many observers the subsequent deployment of armed drones by
theUS Air Force has made that optical detachment even more
complete.Although these UAVs are launched from airbases in
Afghanistan and Iraq,
Figure 1 Predator firing Hellfire missile, Afghanistan 2009(You
Tube)Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aqv J2OqAC0
Gregory ^ From a View to a Kill 191
at University of British Columbia Library on September 3,
2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from
-
most of their missions are controlled via Ku-band satellite link
by operatorsin a Ground Control Station at Creech Air Force Base in
Nevada(Figure 2).4 When Kaplan (2006: 81) visited the base, he was
told: Insidethat trailer is Iraq, inside the other, Afghanistan.
The effortless sense oftime-space compression is exceeded only by
its casual imperialism. Insidethose trailers, Kaplan explained, you
leave North America, which fallsunder Northern Command, and enter
the Middle East, the domain ofCentral Command [CENTCOM]. So much
for the tyranny of geography.But critics insist that this replaces
one tyranny of geography with another.The death of distance enables
death from a distance, and these remotelypiloted missions not only
project power without vulnerability ^ as the AirForce frequently
asserts ^ but also seemingly without compunction(Royakkers and Van
Est, 2010; Webb et al., 2010). Distance lends re-enchantment, you
might say. Some see this as appallingly mundane ^ dis-paraging the
pilots as cubicle warriors or commuter fighters ^ but others,I
think more perceptively, sense a terrifying Olympian power
releasedthrough the UAVs Hellfire missiles. Sometimes I felt like a
God hurlingthunderbolts from afar, one pilot admits (Martin, 2010:
3), and Engelhardt(2009) spells out the metaphors implications:
Those about whom wemake life-or-death decisions, as they scurry
below or carry on as best theycan, have ^ like any beings faced
with the gods ^ no recourse or appeal.
As the Predators and Reapers flown by the USAF have become
moreclosely integrated into counterinsurgency, however, this
picture has becomemore complicated. In what follows I focus on
their hunter-killer role,
Figure 2 Ground Control Station, Creech AFB, NevadaSource: USAF
Photograph/Tech. Sgt Kevin J. Gruenwald
192 Theory, Culture & Society 28(7-8)
at University of British Columbia Library on September 3,
2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from
-
the combination of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance
(ISR) andweapons platform, and then show how the new visibilities
of the battlespaceand of military action that they make possible
affect the targetingcycle. My central argument is that these
visibilities are necessarily condi-tional ^ spaces of constructed
visibility are also always spaces of constructedinvisibility ^
because they are not technical but rather
techno-culturalaccomplishments. Contrary to critics who claim that
these operationsreduce war to a video game in which the killing
space appears remote anddistant, I suggest that these new
visibilities produce a special kind of inti-macy that consistently
privileges the view of the hunter-killer, and whoseimplications are
far more deadly.
The Kill-chain and CounterinsurgencyThe US Air Force estimates
that counterinsurgency requires three to fourtimes as much ISR as
major combat operations because it involves a fluidtarget set that
requires the much longer dwell times that only UAVs cansustain.
Ground operators can be changed at the end of a shift while the
air-craft remains on station and the video stream is uninterrupted.
In such cir-cumstances ISR needs to be not only persistent but also
pervasive: at thelimit gathering intelligence on fast, fleeting,
hidden and unpredictableadversaries requires knowledge of everyone,
everywhere, all the time(Biltgen and Tomes, 2010). This requires a
techno-cultural apparatus thatcan secure a militarized regime of
hypervisibility, which Gordon (2008: 16)describes as a kind of
obscenity of accuracy that abolishes the distinctionsbetween
permission and prohibition, presence and absence. The accuracyof
the intelligence derived from the high-level, high-resolution
imageryfrom the drones may be open to debate, but its production
has unquestion-ably dissolved those distinctions. The
multi-spectral targeting system in thePredator provides real-time
full-motion video (FMV) at 30 frames persecond; its field of view
is restricted, however, and observers complain thatzooming in is
like looking through a soda straw. This is supposed tochange with
the introduction of the Gorgon Stare, which, although provid-ing
lower resolution images (five cameras each shooting two
16-megapixelframes per second), will stream 12 motion video feeds
from a singleReaper in 2011 rising to 65 by 2012.5 The intention is
to quilt the imagestreams in-flight into a tiled mosaic and feed
them to networked usersthrough a dedicated ground station in
theatre that will control the sensorsand coordinate operations with
the flight crew in Nevada (who will stillrely on the Reapers sensor
ball to fly the aircraft).6 The move to wide areasurveillance will
be reinforced by the introduction of the ARGUS-ISsystem, which will
reintroduce high-resolution images via a multi-gigapixelsensor with
a refresh rate of 15 frames per second. These developments(Figure
3) are intended to allow individuals and movements to be
trackedthrough multiple networks to establish a pattern of life
consistent with anemerging paradigm of activity-based intelligence
that is focal for
Gregory ^ From a View to a Kill 193
at University of British Columbia Library on September 3,
2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from
-
counterinsurgency operations (Biltgen and Tomes, 2010; Matthews,
2010;Nakashima andWhitlock, 2011;White, 2010).
Even if these innovations are successful, however, the
production of amacro-field of micro-vision solves one problem by
creating another, and theAir Force has become keenly aware of the
danger of swimming in sensorsand drowning in data.7 A standard
video camera collects over 100,000image frames per hour, and the
USAF has already archived 400,000 hoursof video from its remote
platforms; the rate of accession is rapidly accelerat-ing as ISR
coverage increases. To manage this image surge, the analyticalfield
has been expanded. UAV operators in the United States are
embeddedin an extended network that includes not only troops and
Joint TerminalAttack Controllers using Remotely Operated Video
Enhanced Receivers(ROVER laptops) on the ground in Afghanistan, but
also senior com-manders, mission controllers and military lawyers
at CENTCOMsCombined Air and Space Operations Center (CAOC) at Al
Udeid AirBase in Qatar (Figure 4), and data analysts and image
technicians at itsDistributed Common Ground System (DCGS) at
Langley Air Force Basein Virginia.8 This is a dramatic change from
the pioneer airmen celebratedby Billy Mitchell in the 1920s ^ In
the first place they are alone. No manstands at their shoulder to
support them ^ and, for that matter, the experi-ence of most other
combat pilots today, because UAV operators are neveralone (Cantwell
2009: 75). Currently 185 personnel are required to supportone
Predator or Reaper Combat Air Patrol: 59 are forward deployed
inAfghanistan for Launch and Recovery, 43 are based at Creech
(includingpilots, sensors and mission coordinators), and 83 are
involved in processing,exploitation and dissemination (34 analysing
FMV and 18 signals
Figure 3 Wide-area airborne surveillance (USAF)
194 Theory, Culture & Society 28(7-8)
at University of British Columbia Library on September 3,
2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from
-
intelligence).9 When the staff at the CAOC are added to the
list, a remark-able number of people are able to be in direct or
indirect contact by voice,video or internet relay chat (mIRC) as
each mission progresses.
This network performs a number of vital tasks. First, archived
imagesare scanned to filter out uneventful footage and distinguish
normal activityfrom abnormal activity. Ideally this forensic
monitoring ^ which is a sortof militarized rhythmanalysis, even a
weaponized time-geography10 ^would be based on cultural knowledge,
but the image bank is so vast thatexperiments are under way with
automated software systems for truthingand annotating video
imagery, and new TV technologies are being exploredto tag and
retrieve images (Barnes, 2010; Biltgen and Tomes, 2010; Jean,2011;
Lake, 2010; Shanker and Richtel, 2011).11 Second, commanders,
advi-sers and analysts scan live video streams in order to push
time-critical infor-mation to UAV crews and ground forces
responding to emergent events.These developments reinforce the rush
to the intimate that characterizescounterinsurgency operations, but
in this case the emphasis is as much onthe rush as the intimate
(Gregory, 2008). The hierarchies of the networkare flat and fluid,
its spaces complex and compound, and the missions areexecuted
onscreen through video feeds and chat rooms (displays show asmany
as 30 different chats at a time) that bring a series of personnel
withdifferent skills in different locations into the same zone.
Time and spaceare telescoped so that, as one officer put it, Were
mostly online with eachother as we go (Tirpak, 2009; see also Drew,
2010a).
Figure 4 Combined Air Operations CenterSource: USAF
Photograph/Tech. Sgt Demetrius Lester
Gregory ^ From a View to a Kill 195
at University of British Columbia Library on September 3,
2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from
-
The network is about more than ISR, however, because it is also
aweapon system. UAVs also fulfil the hunter-killer role conveyed by
theirhideous names.12 The Predator carries two Hellfire missiles,
and theReaper can carry 14 Hellfire missiles or two 500 lb JDAM
bombs andfour Hellfire missiles. For all its emphasis on
culture-centric warfare, weneed to remember that contemporary
counterinsurgency is still warfareand is by no means confined to
the non-kinetic. A report on joint militaryoperations in Kandahar
Province in 2008 praised the deadly persistence ofPredators and
Reapers and hailed lethal UAV strikes as the culminatingpoint of
counterinsurgency (Turner et al., 2009). In fact, on General
DavidPetraeuss watch, ten years into the Afghanistan campaign, the
air war hasintensified.13 The information liquidity facilitated by
the extended networkhas not made Cullathers (2003) bombing at the
speed of thought a reality,but it has dramatically compressed what
the Air Force calls the kill-chain(Herbert, 2003). It is true that
since General Dan (Bomber) McNeil relin-quished command in 2008,
kinetic operations including close air supporthave been conditioned
by Rules of Engagement that have sought to mini-mize collateral
damage and, in consequence, soldiers complain that deci-sions move
through the risk mitigation process like molasses (Vaccaro,2009)
and that requests for permission to strike pass through echelons
ofstaffs sitting above me, like owls in trees (West, 2011: 89). But
many ofthose procedures are short-circuited when close air support
is called fortroops in contact and, even in normal circumstances,
the time from findingto engaging emergent targets is now 30^45
minutes; the Air Force aims toreduce this to less than two minutes,
and Cheater (2007: 12) envisages itbeing compressed to seconds by
2025 (Figure 5).
The kill-chain can be thought of as a dispersed and distributed
appa-ratus, a congeries of actors, objects, practices, discourses
and affects, thatentrains the people who are made part of it and
constitutes them as particu-lar kinds of subjects.14 During the
Second World War, the Cold War andeven beyond, the kill-chain was
linear and sequential, directed mainly atfixed and pre-determined
targets, and the time from identification to execu-tion could
extend over days or even weeks. Few of those involved could seethe
process in its entirety, which explains the commingling of what
Harris(2006: 102) calls the mundane and the monstrously violent.
The apparatusthrough which the target was produced and passed
through the links in thechain rendered the business of destruction
unexceptional: extreme forms ofviolence and normal bureaucratic
practices were made co-extensive (2006:114).The late modern
kill-chain is increasingly directed at mobile and emer-gent
targets, and what Kaplow (2010: 96) calls the choreography of
combatrequires rapid processing of intelligence if smart weapons
are not to lookvery stupid indeed. The time-space compression that
this entails hasbrought all those in the network much closer to the
killing space (Grant,2008; Uecker, 2005). Conventional bomber
pilots dont see their targets,explains Singer (2010), but in
contrast to Baumans (2001: 15) jibe aboutmodern
pilots-turned-computer-operators, remote from their targets and
196 Theory, Culture & Society 28(7-8)
at University of British Columbia Library on September 3,
2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from
-
scurrying over those they hit too fast to witness the
devastation they causeand the blood they spill, he insists that all
of those watching a UAV missionin real time see the target up
close, [they] see what happens to it duringthe explosion and the
aftermath. Youre further away physically but you seemore. In fact a
constant refrain of those working from Nevada is that theyare not
further away at all but only eighteen inches from the
battlefield:the distance between the eye and the screen. This
sensation is partly theproduct of the deliberate inculcation of a
warrior culture among UAVpilots, but it is also partly a product of
interpellation, of being drawn intoand captured by the visual field
itself.15
Video GameWar?For this reason, characterizations of the drone
missions as moments in avideo game war that inculcates a
Playstation mentality to killing maywell be wide of the mark
(Alston, 2010: 5; Fellowship of Reconciliation,2010). Critics often
point to Grossmans (1995) study of learning to kill,which
identified distance as a powerful means of overcoming the
resistanceto killing. He argued that in the SecondWorldWar pilots
and bombardierswere protected by distance from seeing the effects
of their bombs(1995: 78): From a distance I can deny your humanity,
and from adistance I cannot hear you scream (1995: 102; see also
Gregory, 2011).
Figure 5 Optimized kill-chain (USAF)
Gregory ^ From a View to a Kill 197
at University of British Columbia Library on September 3,
2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from
-
Although Grossman was writing before UAVs were armed and so
could notdirectly address the drone wars, he did point to
first-person shooter videogames as particularly powerful agents of
conditioning through which playersbecome hardwired for killing, and
his anatomy of killing listed not onlyphysical distance but also
emotional distance, including social, cultural,moral and,
crucially, mechanical distance: the screen that separates thegamer
from the game (1995: 188^9).16 It seems a small step to infer
thatlong-distance killing from a UAV would radicalize those
affective protec-tions. Yet video games do not stage violence as
passive spectacle; they areprofoundly immersive, drawing players in
to their virtual worlds, which isin part why the US military uses
them in its pre-deployment training.17
The video streams from the UAVs seem to produce the same
reality-effect.You see a lot of detail, the commander of the Air
Forces first dedicatedUAV wing notes, so we feel it, maybe not to
the same degree [as] if wewere actually there, but it affects us.
When you let a missile go, heexplains, you know thats real life ^
theres no reset button (Logan, 2009;Zucchino, 2010). One Predator
pilot insists that the horror of watching twoyoung boys on a
bicycle ride into the frame seconds before his missilestruck its
designated target lost none of its impact from being viewed on
ascreen: Death observed was still death (Martin, 2010: 212).
Anecdotescannot settle the matter, of course, but reports of drone
crews sufferingfrom post-traumatic stress induced by constant
exposure to high-resolutionimages of real-time killing and the
after-action inventory of body partsshould be taken extremely
seriously (Lindlaw, 2008).18
There are also salient differences between video games and
videofeeds. First, immersion in video games is discontinuous ^
levels are re-started, situations re-set, games paused ^ and while
there are differentintensities of involvement during a UAV mission
and shifts change in thecourse of a patrol, immersion in the live
video feeds is intrinsically continu-ous.19 The Nintendo mentality
is a detached mentality, a former chief ofstaff argued, whereas
this stuff is real (Cantwell, 2009: 70). Second, videogames staged
in simulacra of Afghanistan show stylized landscapes prowledsolely
by insurgents or terrorists whose cartoonish appearance makesthem
instantly recognizable; the neo-Orientalism of these renditions is
amatter of dismal record (see Hglund, 2008). But the video feeds
fromUAVs reveal a much more complicated, inhabited landscape in
which dis-tinctions between civilians and combatants are intensely
problematic. Theexistence of so many eyes in that crowded sky ^
commanders, controllers,analysts and, significantly, military
lawyers ^ is a (pre)caution that the pres-ence of civilians is a
constant possibility. The risk of collateral damage hasbecome a
vital consideration throughout the kill-chain, driven by both
theprotocols of international law and also the prospect of public
scrutiny. Thismarks a third crucial difference from video games
because, as Grossman(1995: 314^16) acknowledges, killing in combat
is regulated by rules andlegal sanctions, and defenders of the
drone missions routinely draw attentionto the laws of armed
conflict, the Uniform Code of Military Justice and
198 Theory, Culture & Society 28(7-8)
at University of British Columbia Library on September 3,
2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from
-
the Rules of Engagement that govern them.20 One informed
commentatorargues that the longer dwell times and enhanced video
streams from thedrones have considerably enlarged the role of judge
advocates who, sincethe late 1980s, have provided expert counsel to
commanders about the pros-ecution of targets (Beard, 2009: 422).21
The staff judge advocate at theCAOC claims that its airborne ISR
that gives us the ability to actuallyapply [laws of armed conflict]
principles (with almost mathematical preci-sion) that were
originally just concepts (Brown, cited in Dunlap, 2010:141).22 For
deliberate targeting, where targets are typically developed
over36^40 hours, legal advisers review target folders containing
imagery andother intelligence, collateral damage estimates and the
weaponeering solu-tions proposed to mitigate those effects, and
monitor the continued develop-ment of the target. For dynamic
targeting the procedure is compressed ^ amatter of minutes ^
because the targets are time-sensitive, but a judgeadvocate is
still required to validate the target. In both cases legal
advisersare stationed on the combat operations floor of the CAOC to
scrutinizeimage streams, live communications and collateral damage
estimates, andto inform the commander of the legal parameters of
any attack. The finaldecision rests with the commander, but the
staff judge advocate boaststhat his colleagues explicitly guarantee
extra benefits to civilians (Shanker,2008).23
Transparency, Intimacy and the BattlespaceYet this is too glib
by far. Beard (2009) makes it clear that these precau-tions ^ like
the laws from which they derive ^ are not intended to preventall
civilians from being killed during military operations. The
principle ofdiscrimination between civilians and combatants is
always qualified by theprinciple of proportionality. This means
that sometimes civilian deaths areaccidental ^ the system is far
from perfect ^ but in others they are inciden-tal to what is deemed
to be concrete and direct military advantage, inwhich case they
have been anticipated in collateral damage estimates andendorsed by
judge advocates (Beard, 2009: 43; cf. Owens, 2003). As thisimplies,
the legal armature that secures the process of validation
andendorsement is not above the fray but is embedded within it, and
to referto the prosecution of the target is to concede that judge
advocates are notimpartial tribunes, still less defence attorneys.
Their incorporation into thekill-chain evidently does not diminish
the privilege accorded to the militaryin the determination of
military advantage; as Orford (2010: 339) empha-sizes, the relevant
body of international law immerses its addressees in aworld of
military calculations and ensures that proportionality will
alwaysbe weighed on the militarys own scales. Nevertheless, the
media makesmuch of the legal nexus ^ rendering targeting as a
pseudo-judicial process(cf. Gordon, 2004; Weizman, 2010) ^ and the
Wall Street Journal and itswriters are not alone in maintaining
that the heightened visual-judicial scru-tiny makes for a more
moral campaign: Never before in the history of air
Gregory ^ From a View to a Kill 199
at University of British Columbia Library on September 3,
2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from
-
warfare have we been able to distinguish as well between
combatants andcivilians as we can with drones (Editorial, 2010;
Phillips, 2010).
And yet when Beard (2009: 410 and passim) writes repeatedly of
theunprecedented level of transparency made possible by the new
visual tech-nologies he is referring to the new visibility of
military actions ^ to theirexposure to public view ^ and to the
possibility of sanctions if the laws ofarmed conflict are breached:
not to the visibility of the battlespace. Thismatters because
contemporary counterinsurgency is often described as waramongst the
people, where it is formidably, constitutively difficult to
distin-guish between combatants and civilians. As the Pentagons own
DefenseScience Board admitted: Enemy leaders look like everyone
else; enemycombatants look like everyone else; enemy vehicles look
like civilian vehi-cles; enemy installations look like civilian
installations; enemy equipmentand materials look like civilian
equipment and materials . . . (DefenseScience Board Summer Study,
2004: 154). This central, existential problemwould remain even if
the battlespace could be made fully transparent. Itmay be mitigated
by the persistent presence of UAVs and their enhancedISR
capability, and in some measure by the pattern of life analysis
thismakes possible, but it cannot be erased.24
In fact, the intimacy of time-space compression produced by the
newvisual technologies is highly selective. When a journalist
compared thechat-rooms of the kill-chain to Facebook and marvelled
at how easily thedistance could melt away, he was describing the
intimacy produced throughmilitary-social networking (Drew, 2010a).
When officers at Creech arguedthat the amount of time spent
surveilling an area from a UAV creates agreater sense of intimacy
than is possible from conventional aircraft, theywere describing
not their familiarity with the human terrain ofAfghanistan but
their identification of ^ and crucially with ^ Americantroops in
the battlespace. Theres no detachment, their commanderexplained.
Those employing the system are very involved at a personallevel in
combat. You hear the AK-47 going off, the intensity of the voiceon
the radio calling for help. Youre looking at him, 18 inches away
fromhim, trying everything in your capability to get that person
out of trouble(McCloskey, 2009). Similarly, when a Predator pilot
claimed that I knewpeople down there, it was not local people he
claimed to know: Each daythrough my cameras I snooped around and
came to recognize the facesand figures of our soldiers and marines
(Martin, 2010: 121). One jointteam reported that the personal and
almost daily interaction betweenground forces and UAV operators,
and the strong personal relationshipswith the pilots and sensor
operators successfully compressed kill-chainsand produced
intelligence of greater value (Turner et al., 2009: 9). Thesense of
identification and involvement that is induced by these new formsof
time-space compression takes on special significance in the light
ofGrossmans (1995: 90, 149^50) claim that a sense of accountability
to com-rades-in-arms is a powerful means of overcoming resistance
to killing,because it suggests that the greater incidence of
civilian casualties when
200 Theory, Culture & Society 28(7-8)
at University of British Columbia Library on September 3,
2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from
-
close air support is provided to troops in contact may result
not only fromtime-critical targeting and its correspondingly fewer
checks to determineif there is a civilian presence (Human
RightsWatch, 2008: 30) ^ which iswidely acknowledged ^ but also
from the persistent presence of the UAVand its video feeds
immersing its remote operators in, and to some substan-tial degree
rendering them responsible for the evolving situation on
theground.25 This predicament, in which proximity not distance
becomes theproblem, cannot be resolved by tinkering with the Rules
of Engagement;high-resolution imagery is not a uniquely technical
capacity but part of atechno-cultural system that renders our space
familiar even in theirspace ^ which remains obdurately Other.
An example will illustrate what I mean.26 In the early morning
of21 February 2010 a team from US Special Forces was moving in to
searchthe village of Khud in Oruzgan province in central
Afghanistan, whichhad been identified as a Taliban stronghold.
Before first light an AC-130gunship spotted three vehicles with
what its crew called unlawful personnelin the back, moving down a
dirt road five miles away. The Joint TerminalAttack Controller (
JTAC) with the Special Forces detachment confirmedfrom intercepted
but unidentified radio communications that they were set-ting
themselves up for an attack, and later, on the same basis, that
theywere probably looking at a Taliban force with a high-level
Taliban com-mander. A Predator was called in to track the vehicles;
its crew had inter-mittent mIRC contact with the gunship until it
ran low on fuel and had tocede the chain of custody, but because
the JTAC had no laptop thePredator crew only had (sometimes garbled
or broken) radio contact withthe Special Forces detachment and
could only transmit video to their com-mand posts. Following
standard operating procedure, the image analysts inthe Distributed
Common Ground System were linked only to the Predatorcrew and had
no direct contact with the troops on the ground. The noise inthe
network was compounded because video feeds were of variable
quality,and the Predator crew had to rely on infra-red sensors in
the half-lightuntil they could switch to Day TV; even then the
weather intermittentlymuddied the image stream. Still, the Predator
crew did not hesitate to iden-tify tactical movement and
individuals holding cylindrical objects thatthey believed (in fact
hoped) were rifles. When the sensor operator com-mented that it was
weird how they all have cold spots on their chests thepilot
explained that its what theyve been doing here lately, wrapping
their[expletive] up in their man dresses so you cant [positively
identify] it. Inthe absence of a positive identification, the JTAC
warned them of theRules of Engagement, but the sensor operator
insisted that the truckwould make a beautiful target. When an image
analyst identified at leastone child the pilot objected that he was
so quick to call [expletive] kidsbut not to call a [expletive]
rifle, and the sensor operator agreed: I reallydoubt that children
call . . . I really [expletive] hate that. They were told towait
for the ground commander to assess proportionality, distinction
^there is no direct record of any clearance from the CAOC ^ the
crew
Gregory ^ From a View to a Kill 201
at University of British Columbia Library on September 3,
2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from
-
continued to report definite suspicious movement, definite
tactical move-ment and spoke of lookouts, human shields and a
grouping of forces.When they saw the occupants of the vehicles get
out to pray they were con-vinced they were looking at Taliban:
seriously, thats what they do.The mis-sion intelligence coordinator
at Creech agreed: Theyre gonna dosomething nefarious.
By now fuel limitations had forced the gunship to withdraw and
cedethe chain of custody to the Predator, but because the UAV had
only onemissile left, two Kiowa attack helicopters were called in.
The Predator crewhoped that theyll let us have one vehicle since we
tracked them for solong ^ otherwise the pilot reckoned they would
just watch and be on squir-ter patrol. By now the CAOC had now
designated the situation as Troopsin Contact (TIC) and the crew was
increasingly impatient: Cant wait tillthis actually happens, with
all this co-ordination and [expletive]. Theywere clearly
exasperated when they were told that a Reaper was beingbrought in
above them to attack the target: You gotta be kiddinme! . . .
[Expletive] that, man. . . . Just claim were here first. The
Predatorpilot told the JTAC that the image analysts had identified
21 military-aged males and two possible children; when asked if
these were teenagersor toddlers they were described as potential
adolescents . . . early teens,and the JTAC agreed that 12^13 years
old with a weapon is just as danger-ous. As soon as the Reaper
arrived on station it was reassigned to anotherTIC, which prompted
the sensor operator to dream of having a whole fleetof [Predators]
up here which would be awesome. The rest of the conversa-tion is
classified until the sensor operator remarks: That would be badass.
But were not killers, we are ISR. The pilot told the sensor
operatorthat as long as you keep somebody that we can shoot in the
field of viewIm happy. At 0915, when the convoy was 12 miles from
Khod and nolonger heading towards the village, the helicopters were
cleared to engage,the sensor operator shouting Remember:
Kill-chain! (followed by laughter),and then, as the smoke started
to clear, there was an eerie silence: Nobodyis talking to me, said
the pilot. The sensor operator zoomed in to see a guywho looks like
hes wearing jewelry and stuff like a girl, but he aint . . . Eight
minutes later women and children were identified, but too late.That
lady is carrying a kid, says the pilot, and the sensor operator
agreed:Right there in the crosshairs. They consoled themselves that
they couldnot have known: No way to tell from here.
Subsequent reports identified at least 23 people dead and more
than adozen wounded, including three children: all civilians,
shopkeepers goingfor supplies, students returning to school, people
seeking medical treatmentand families with children off to visit
relatives (Cloud, 2011a). Most ofthem were Hazaras, who have
traditionally opposed the Pashtun-dominatedTaliban. No video
footage has been released to the public, but officers wholater
viewed the feed said that it was clear from the tape that
civilianswere about to be rocketed (Cullison and Rosenberg, 2010).
It seemsequally clear that the Predator crews identification with
the Special Forces
202 Theory, Culture & Society 28(7-8)
at University of British Columbia Library on September 3,
2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from
-
team ^ the intimacy of the time-space compression from Nevada
toOruzgan ^ had converted civilians into combatants: in his desire
to supportthe ground forces, an Air Force investigation concluded,
the Predator pilothad a strong desire to find weapons which
colored, both consciously andunconsciously, his reporting (Drew,
2010b). Thus objects become rifles,praying a Taliban signifier,
civilians military-aged males, and children ado-lescents. If seeing
is believing, it is also techno-culturally mediated. AnArmy inquiry
condemned the Predator crews unprofessional and inaccu-rate
reporting, and while this certainly seems to have been the case,
placingthe onus only on individuals obscures the structural effect
of a militaryapparatus and political technology that viscerally
immerses physicallyremote operators in combat and reinforces their
sense of communion withtroops on the ground. In an editorial the
Los Angeles Times drew attentionto the eagerness of the drones crew
to find and attack the enemy and theirpalpable disdain for those in
the chain of command whose job it is to pro-ceed carefully
(Editorial, 2011). Within such a space of constructed visibil-ity,
it was virtually impossible for the victims of the attack to be
seen ascivilians until it was too late, a terrible instance of what
Chow (2006: 42)calls the inability to handle the otherness of the
other beyond the orbitthat is the bombers own path. The scopic
regime ensured that the battle-space would be viewed through a
one-way mirror, its transparency tragi-cally illusory.
Transparency, Publicity and the BattlespaceAnd yet Beards (2009)
point about the visibility of military actions iswell taken,
because there is another sense in which counterinsurgency iswar
amongst the people: the presence of the media means that the
fightis conducted in every living room in the world as well as on
the streetsand fields of a conflict zone (Smith, 2006: 17). This
too is limited, partialand conditional, of course: there are few
narratives as detailed as the oneI have summarized, even in
redacted form, and the video feeds releasedfor public view ^
WikiLeaks apart27 ^ are carefully selected. Summariesof some
military inquiries into incidents where civilians have been
killedare made public, as in the Khod case, but faced with the
pervasive prob-lem of distinguishing combatants from civilians it
is scarcely surprisingthat several discursive tactics should also
have been devised to mitigatethe media impact of civilian
casualties. None of them is confined to theAir Forces deployment of
UAVs in Afghanistan, but their role has beenreinforced by the
controversy surrounding the programme of extra-judicialexecutions
carried out by CIA-operated drones across the border
inPakistan.
The first is to dispute the civilian status of the casualties.
This isa timeworn tactic that can be traced back at least to the
SecondWorld War, but it has been given a new lease on life (and
death) incontemporary wars against non-state actors. Referring
explicitly to the
Gregory ^ From a View to a Kill 203
at University of British Columbia Library on September 3,
2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from
-
use of UAVs to carry out targeted killings in Afghanistan
andPakistan, Etzioni (2010: 69) has proposed a distinction between
inno-cent civilians and those abusive civilians who refuse to
separate them-selves from the local population; in doing so they
forfeit their rightto protection, he argues, and the responsibility
for the deaths of thetruly innocent is theirs alone.28 If it is
difficult to distinguish combat-ants from civilians in
counterinsurgency, it is apparently simple toparse the civilian
population. What Etzioni and others like him seekto do is to
identify a grey zone between participation and non-participa-tion
in hostilities in order to exploit it: thus one former judge
advocateargues that these grey areas should be interpreted
liberally, which isto say in favor of finding direct participation
(Schmitt, 2004: 509,2010: 738; cf. Gregory, 2006).
Second, while the new air war is not quite the war without
witnessesof the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the space
in which thesecontinuing operations have been brought into public
view remains strikinglylimited. Media coverage in North America and
Europe has focused on thespaces of the extended network,
particularly Creech and the CAOC, whilethe space of the target has
been radically underexposed. The USAF issuesterse daily airpower
summaries in which Predators and Reapers are said toprovide armed
overwatch for friendly forces and release precision-guidedmunitions
that destroy enemy positions, targets and vehicles. This is
anartful reassertion of the conventional object-ontology that is at
odds withthe event-ontology that informs contemporary
counterinsurgency, and itmakes ground truth vanish in the ultimate
God-trick whose vengeancedepends on making its objects visible and
its subjects invisible (cf.Gregory, 2010b). This effect is
compounded by the absence in Afghanistanof the vigorous local press
coverage of drone strikes across the border inPakistan, which means
that, ironically, we know much more aboutthe impact of the CIAs
secret war (and correspondingly less about itskill-chain).
Third, civilian casualties are excused in biopolitical terms.
This takesmultiple forms, but one example will illustrate the
principle (or lack ofit). Lt General William Caldwells prescription
for what he calls curingAfghanistan requires that combat operations
no longer be described inthe language of war; instead Afghanistan
should be treated as an ailingpatient ^ in many ways analogous to a
weakened person under attack byan aggressive infection. The
increase in offensive operations then becomesa late but powerful
and much-needed dose of antibiotics designed toallow the countrys
indigenous immune system to be restored. Caldwellconcedes that,
similar to a powerful antibiotic there are side-effectsthat can
cause discomfort and pain, including disruption of daily lifeand
sometimes civilian casualties. But commanders make every effort
tominimize them, because the air dominance guaranteed by manned
andunmanned aerial platforms permits the restrained application of
com-bat power with surgical precision (Caldwell and Hagerott,
2010).
204 Theory, Culture & Society 28(7-8)
at University of British Columbia Library on September 3,
2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from
-
Bio-medical metaphors like these work to render military
violence intrinsi-cally therapeutic; counterinsurgency becomes
chemotherapy, killing insur-gent cells and sometimes even innocent
bodies to save the body politic,and hunter-killer missions
activated through the networked kill-chainbecome perfectly
consistent with, in fact the very apotheosis of, whatDillon and
Reid (2009) call the liberal way of war.29
Cultural DividesThere is a long history of assuming that air war
is, by its very nature, virtu-ous: that attacks from the air can
either deter war in the first place orbring it to a speedy end
without the protracted carnage of ground warfarein the second. This
progressivist ideology, with its emphasis on economyand efficiency
^ beneficial bombing as Clodfelter (2010) calls it ^ survivedthe
horrors of the Second World War more or less intact, and Swift
(2010)has proposed (though in markedly less celebratory terms) that
todaysPredator drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan are the direct
descendants ofthe Heinkels and Lancaster bombers of the Second
World War. I am notsure that he is right.There are continuities
between the two, at once ideolog-ical and operational, and many
advocates of air power before and after theSecond World War
imagined something like todays drone operations withuncanny
foresight. Celebrating victory over Japan in 1945, for
example,General Henry HapArnold famously noted that: We have just
won a warwith a lot of heroes flying around in planes. But, he
continued, the nextwar may be fought by airplanes with no men in
them at all. There areother continuities, but there are also
significant differences, and the linesof descent are complex.
For its part, invoking the Revolution in MilitaryAffairs and its
succes-sor projects, the USAF claims that it has moved from
industrial age toinformation age warfare. Since the SecondWorldWar,
the number of weap-ons (aircraft/bombs) involved in attacking a
target has substantiallydecreased while the number of sensors
involved has substantially increased.Armed UAVs have played a vital
role in this transformation, yet if theUSAF sees this as crossing a
cultural divide of precision and information(Figure 6), critics
worry that a different Rubicon has been crossed. Farfrom the
precision-strike capacity of virtuous war, Britains Air
ChiefMarshall Sir Brian Burridge has described the hunter-killer
missions asvirtue-less war involving neither heroism nor courage
(Mayer, 2009).What he has in mind is a central tenet of many
ethical claims aboutarmed combat: that it is only permissible to
kill if you run the risk ofbeing killed yourself. In contrast,
remote UAV operations allow what theUSAF calls the projection of
power without vulnerability.30 This is onlytrue in a particular
sense, of course: pilots and operators at Creech AirForce Base are
plainly out of harms way, but the forward-deployed operatorsand
ground crews are not. Still, Burridges point goes to the very heart
of
Gregory ^ From a View to a Kill 205
at University of British Columbia Library on September 3,
2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from
-
late modern war. Indeed, Gros (2010: 268) doubts that it is
proper to call itwar at all:
New conflicts, in their hyper-technical version, marginalize or
even comple-tely evacuate that minimal equality in the face of
death that constituted theidentity of what, among the violence and
the massacres, the clashes andthe raiding, used to be distinguished
as war.
If there is something predatory about these new states of
violence,however, that equality in the face of death ^ and with it
the raw intimacyof the killing space ^ has been effaced by more
technologies than thePredator or Reaper: think of Cruise missiles
that can be launched fromships hundreds of miles from their
targets. What is distinctive about thehunter-killer platforms is
the dispersion and distribution of both the face-less enemies that
wage war from afar (Kilcullen and Exum, 2009) and thefaces of their
human targets across a network that produces a peculiarlynew form
of intimacy, at once collective and one-sided. For, as I haveshown,
the time-space compression of the kill-chain ensures that,
whatevercultural divide has been crossed in precision and
information, another hasbeen signally reinforced: the
techno-cultural distinction between theirspace and our space,
between the eye and the target. The two planes of
Figure 6 A cultural divide of precision and information
(USAF)
206 Theory, Culture & Society 28(7-8)
at University of British Columbia Library on September 3,
2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from
-
conventional air war ^ the view from above and the view from
below ^ arefused in the network operations that I have described:
as a MissionCoordinator at Creech put it, Youre watching what they
see, eighteeninches from the battlefield (Guernica, 2010). But in
this new militaryoptic, both points of view are always ours.
AcknowledgementsI am grateful to Ben Anderson and three
anonymous referees for their comments on a firstdraft of this
article, and to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
for finan-cial support.
Notes1. A drone is the popular term for the aircraft I discuss
here, but the UnitedStates Air Force prefers Remotely Piloted
Aircraft (RPA) or Unmanned AerialVehicle (UAV); when these aircraft
are part of an integrated network ^ as here ^this is referred to as
an Unmanned Aerial System (UAS). To describe them asunmanned is
misleading, however, because while a UAV does not carry a pilot,the
system is operated and supported by several hundred personnel.
2. Bill Roggio maintains a tally of drone strikes in Pakistan at
http://www.long-warjournal.org/pakistan-strikes.php. Counting the
strikes is relatively straightfor-ward, but estimating casualties
is much more contentious.
3. There are many different UAVs operated in Afghanistan by both
ground andair forces; my discussion is confined to US Air Force
operations, and I focus onthe MQ-1 (Predator) and the MQ-9
(Reaper), which, unlike smaller UAVs, areusually armed. The first
Predators were developed by General Atomics for thePentagon and the
CIA between 1994 and 1996, and were deployed to Bosnia in1995 and
Kosovo in 1996. MQ-1A Predators were armed with Hellfire missilesin
early 2001 and rushed to Afghanistan after 9/11. The MQ-9 Reaper
came intoservice in Afghanistan in September 2007; it can fly
higher (50,000/25,000 ft)and faster (230/84 mph) than the Predator,
has a much greater range (3682/454miles) and carries a much heavier
weapon load. The US Army also operates (usu-ally much smaller) UAVs
launched and controlled in-theatre whose primary roleis to provide
video feeds to attack helicopters and ground forces.
4. The 7000 mile distance imposes a 1.8 second delay in control
inputs that makesit impossible for remote operators to perform
take-offs and landings, which arethe responsibility of forward
deployed Launch and Recovery crews that use aline-of-sight data
link.
5. There is a trade-off: Reapers equipped with Gorgon Stare will
fly unarmed andon shorter missions as a result of the increased
power demands and drag on theaircraft imposed by the new sensor
pods. This will presumably redouble the sig-nificance of UAVs
hunting in flocks or swarms and being in close contact withother
assets, since targets identified by the Gorgon Stare will have to
be attackedfrom other platforms.
6. Preliminary tests of Gorgon Stare in October 2010 suggested
that the systemwas not operationally effective (Cloud and Dilanian,
2011; Nakashima, 2011).The real-time resolution level was too
coarse to track dismounts (people); imagestitching was so poor that
the ability to track targets across the image seams
Gregory ^ From a View to a Kill 207
at University of British Columbia Library on September 3,
2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from
-
was compromised; and software errors made geo-location
inaccurate and inconsis-tent. These problems were aggravated by a
low rate of image transmission to theground station that confounded
the prosecution of dynamic targets.The USAFdis-missed the report as
preliminary, however, and the system was deployed toAfghanistan
just in time for the Talibans spring offensive in April 2011.
7. The phrase was first used in July 2009 by Lt Gen. David
Deptula when he wasthe Air Forces deputy chief of staff for ISR,
and it has since become a leitmotifin discussions of ISR.
8. The USAF has five DCGS stations, three in the US and two in
Germany andKorea, linked in a system known as Sentinel.
9. A Combat Air Patrol (CAP) involves a 24-hour presence in a
target box orcombat zone, and usually requires three or four
aircraft: one on station, one ortwo en route and one on the ground.
The USAF has increased the number ofdaily CAPS flown by Predators
and Reapers from just six in 2004 through 12 in2006 and 34 in 2008
to 53 by 2010, and plans to increase this to 65 by FY 2013(Black,
2011). As the number of CAPs increases, and the image stream
multiplieseven more rapidly, the Air Force will face a serious
problem in manning itsunmanned platforms unless a significant
number of routine operations can beautomated (Schanz, 2011).
10. The details are classified, but the US military is known to
use GeoTime, aprogram that fuses and visualizes geo-spatial,
temporal and intelligence datafrom multiple sources (combining the
where, the when and the who) as a three-dimensional array that
replicates the standard time-geography diagrams developedby Swedish
geographer Torsten Hgerstrand in the 1960s and 1970s.The
programincludes dedicated pattern-finding tools that allow users to
navigate the data inreal time for rapid visual discovery of
patterns of behavior (see http://www.geotime.com).
11. On video analytics and its algorithms, see Crandall (2010:
72^3) (though heseems to minimize the technical and operational
difficulties involved).
12. They are also described as MALE (Mid-Altitude
Long-Endurance) drones,and since the US military is evidently
fixated by its acronyms it would not be dif-ficult to read this as
a techno-cultural version of the voyeurism of the Orientalistgaze
in which the Orient reclines unsuspecting beneath their persistent,
penetrat-ing stare. Thus, for example, Martin (2010: 81) describes
his role as a voyeur inthe sky and notes that the poor bastards
never once considered looking up, wayup, from which height Predator
crews observed their every move. Hypervisibilitythen becomes a
climactic voyeurism. Such a reading also draws attention to
thetechno-masculinization that advances the abstract disembodiment
of latemodern war (see Masters, 2005).
13. The total number of Close Air Support sorties flown by all
types of aircraftincreased from 6495 in 2004 through 20,359 in 2008
to 33,679 in 2010.
14. The term derives from Foucault, but Deleuzes (1992: 160)
gloss is particularlyapposite: dispositifs or apparatuses comprise
curves of visibility and curves ofenunciation, in other words, they
are machines which make one see and speak.
15. That this is a process requires emphasis. One UAV pilot
confessed that whenhe made his first kill, he was concentrating
entirely on the shot and its technical
208 Theory, Culture & Society 28(7-8)
at University of British Columbia Library on September 3,
2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from
-
aspects; the man in his sights was only a high-tech image on a
computer screen.But subsequent missions gradually produced a sense
not only of involvement butalso of (conditional) responsibility and
even, on occasion, remorse (Martin, 2010:43^4, 52^5, 212).
16. Cf. OConnell (2009: 9^10), who claims that the central
factors in Grossmansstudy also characterize drone operations, which
in her eyes look very much likea video game. In fairness, I should
note that some of the sources on which sherelies for her account of
the conduct of those (CIA) operations have been overtakenby
events.
17. The military also uses them for recruitment, which is much
more problematic,and on its website the Air Force does stage the
hunter-killer missions as video-game entertainment (see Fly the
MQ-9 Reaper at http://www.airforce.com/games-and-extras). More
generally, however, late modern war prizes skills likerapid
hand-eye coordination, multi-tasking and visual acuity that are
honed byplaying video games ^ to that extent, Chow (2006: 35) is
right ^ but this doesnot automatically reduce war to a video
game.
18. Others may be more blase ; the vice chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staffdescribed jaded analysts watching archived hours of
what he (and apparentlythey) call Death TV (Lake, 2010).
19. I owe this suggestion to Ben Anderson.
20. Military lawyers prefer the term laws of armed conflict
(LOAC) to the moreusual international humanitarian law.
21. Beard served as Associate Deputy General Counsel
(International Affairs),Office of the Secretary of Defense,
1990^2004.
22. The mathematical precision presumably refers to collateral
damage modellingrather than the legal principles and concepts,
since elsewhere the same officer con-cedes that proportionality is
not a mathematical formula or anything like thatand that the laws
of armed conflict contain some very wiggly concept[s](Transcript,
Department of Defense Bloggers Roundtable with Col. Gary Brown,27
May 2009).
23. I have condensed this idealized account from Targeting
(USAF, 2006) and AirForce Operations and the Law ( Judge Advocate
Generals School, Maxwell AirForce Base, 2009: ch. 16). See also
Shanker (2008); Mulrine (2008); Kurle(2010); Bitzes (2011). For a
rare description of how the legal process works in prac-tice, see
Hyland (2010).
24. One example: a Predator operated by the CIA killed Baitullah
Mehsud, theleader of the Pakistan Taliban (TTP), on 5 August 2009;
but it took 16 strikesover the preceding 14 months before he was
assassinated, in the course ofwhich 200^320 other people were
killed (Mayer, 2009). Visual imagery is clearlyinsufficient, and
Adair (2010) insists that optimal engagement of UAVs demandsa
nuanced understanding of the environment gained only through
interactionwith the population on the ground ^ UAV use is not a
panacea for face-to-faceinteraction.Although there are continuing
experiments in detecting voice signa-tures and chemical signatures
(emitted by IED factories) from airborne plat-forms, these are
clearly supplements to not substitutes for detailed
humanintelligence.
Gregory ^ From a View to a Kill 209
at University of British Columbia Library on September 3,
2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from
-
25. There is only one recorded instance of US troops being
killed by friendly firefrom a UAV to date. On 6 April 2011 Marines
under fire in southernAfghanistan mistook hot spotson a video feed
from a Predator for Taliban fight-ers moving toward them and called
in a missile strike; in fact they were UStroops moving in to
reinforce the Marines, and two of them died from theirwounds
(Cloud, 2011b). A Pentagon spokesperson explained that the video
feedssometimes provide blurry or unclear images of conditions on
the ground,making it hard for screeners responsible for searching
the video for possible tar-gets to always understand what they are
seeing (MacAskill, 2011).
26. This account is derived from the official transcript of
radio transmissions,chat log and intercom conversations obtained by
the Los Angeles Times under aFreedom of Information request. The
transcript is redacted, and does not includecommunications with the
CAOC, or any video footage (see Cloud, 2011a).
27. I have in mind the video footage showing the crew of an
Apache helicoptergunning down civilians in Baghdad in July 2007
(see http://www.collateralmurder.com).
28. This is an astonishing essay and I dont have space to do it
justice, but there isone claim that bears directly on the present
discussion. Etzioni claims that criti-cisms are written by people
who yearn for a nice clean war, one in which onlybad people will be
killed using surgical strikes that inflict no collateral
damage(2010: 71) This is an extraordinary inversion, since it is
proponents of UAVs thatconsistently connect them to a
surgical-strike capacity.
29. Mitchell (2011: 53) notes that the origins of immunity lie
in politico-legal notbio-medical discourse; but he suggests
treating counterterrorism as a publichealth crisis rather than a
war and calls for a strengthening of the immunesystem ^ seemingly
unaware of the biopolitical integuments of late modern war.
30. The UAVs themselves are highly vulnerable; in Afghanistan
(and elsewhere)they fly in uncontested airspace, but in other war
zones in their present formtheir operational life would be much
shorter.
ReferencesAdair, J. (2010) Personalizing an Impersonal Weapon:
Integrating Armed UAVsand Ground Forces, PowerPoint presentation,
US Army and Marine CorpsCounterinsurgency Center, COIN Symposium,
13 May.Alston, P. (2010) Report of the Special Rapporteur on
Extrajudicial, Summary orArbitrary Executions; Addendum: Study on
Targeted Killings. Geneva: UnitedNations.Anderson, K. (2009)
Targeted Killing in US Counterterrorism Strategy and Law,Working
Paper of the Series on Counterterrorism and American Statutory
LawNo. 9, May. Washington, DC: Brookings, URL (consulted September
2011):http://www.brookings.edu/papers/2009/0511_counterterrorism_anderson.aspx.Barnes,
J. (2010) US Military Turns to TV for Surveillance Technology,
LosAngeles Times, 7 June.Bauman, Z. (2001) Wars of the
Globalization Era, European Journal of SocialTheory 4: 11^28.
210 Theory, Culture & Society 28(7-8)
at University of British Columbia Library on September 3,
2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from
-
Beard, J. (2009) Law and War in the Virtual Era, American
Journal ofInternational Law 103: 409^45.Biltgen, P. and R.Tomes
(2010) Rebalancing ISR, Geospatial Intelligence Forum8(6):
14^16.Bitzes, J. (2011) Role of an Air Operations Center (AOC)
Legal Adviser inTargeting, Conference on Drones, Remote Targeting
and the Promise of Law,NewAmerica Foundation,Washington DC, 24
February.Black, B. (2011) Air Force UAS Global Operations, Future
of Unmanned AircraftSymposium, International Institute for
Strategic Studies,Washington DC, April.Caldwell,W. and M. Hagerott
(2010) Curing Afghanistan, Foreign Policy 7 April,URL (consulted
September 2011):
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/04/07/curing_afghanistan.Cantwell,
H. (2009) Operators of Air Force Unmanned Systems, Air and
SpacePower Journal 33(2): 67^77.Cheater, J. (2007) Accelerating the
Kill Chain via Future Unmanned Aircraft.Center for Strategy and
Technology, Air War College, April. URL (consultedSeptember 2011):
http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/cst/bh_cheater.pdf.Chow, R.
(2006) The Age of the World Target: Atomic Bombs, Alterity,
AreaStudies, pp. 25^43 in The Age of the World Target:
Self-referentiality in War,Theory and ComparativeWork. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.Clodfelter, M. (2010) Beneficial Bombing: The
Progressive Foundations ofAmerican Air Power, 1917^1945. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press.Cloud, D. (2011a) Combat by Camera:
Anatomy of an AfghanWar Tragedy, LosAngeles Times, 10 April.Cloud,
D. (2011b) Two US Troops Killed by Friendly Fire in Afghanistan,
LosAngeles Times, 11 April.Cloud, D. and K. Dilanian (2011)
Proposed Drone Spy System Fails Testing,According to Draft Report,
Los Angeles Times, 25 January.Crandall, J. (2010) The
Geospatialization of Calculative Operations: Tracking,Sensing and
Megacities,Theory, Culture & Society 27: 68^90.Cullather, N.
(2003) Bombing at the Speed of Thought: Intelligence in theComing
Age of Cyberwar, Intelligence and National Security 18:
141^54.Cullison, A. and M. Rosenberg (2010) Afghan Deaths Spur US
Reprimands,WallStreet Journal, 31 May.Defense Science Board Summer
Study (2004) Transition to and from Hostilities.Washington, DC:
Department of Defense.Deleuze, G. (1992) What Is a Dispositif?, in
Michel Foucault Philosopher:Essays, trans. T. Armstrong. NewYork:
Routledge.Der Derian, J. (2009) VirtuousWar: Mapping the
Military-industrial-media-enter-tainment Network, 2nd edn. NewYork:
Routledge.Dillon, M. and J. Reid (2009) The LiberalWay of War:
Killing to Make Life Live.London: Routledge.Drew, C. (2010a)
Military Taps into Social Networking Skills, NewYork Times,
7June.
Gregory ^ From a View to a Kill 211
at University of British Columbia Library on September 3,
2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from
-
Drew, C. (2010b) Study Cites Crew in Attack on Afghans, New York
Times,10 September.Dunlap, C. (2010) Come the Revolution: A Legal
Perspective on Air Operationsin Iraq Since 2003, pp. 139^54 in R.
Pedrozo (ed.) The War in Iraq: A LegalAnalysis. Newport, RI:
NavalWar College.Editorial (2010) The DroneWars,Wall Street
Journal, 9 January.Editorial (2011) Behind US Condolence Payments
for Afghan Civilians,Los Angeles Times, 12 April.Engelhardt,T.
(2009) War of theWorlds, TomDispatch, 8 October.Etzioni, E. (2010)
Unmanned Aircraft Systems: The Moral and Legal Case, JointForces
Quarterly 57: 66^71.Fellowship of Reconciliation (2010) Convenient
Killing: Armed Drones and thePlaystation Mentality. Oxford:
Fellowship of Reconciliation.Gordon, A. (2008) Ghostly Matters:
Haunting and the Sociological Imagination.Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.Gordon, N. (2004) Rationalizing Extra-judicial
Executions: The Israeli Pressand the Legitimisation of Abuse,
International Journal of Human Rights 8:305^24.Grant, R. (2008) The
All-seeing Air Force, Air Force Magazine, September.Gregory, D.
(2006) In Another Time-zone the Bombs Fall Safely:
Targets,Civilians and Late ModernWar, ArabWorld Geographer 9(2):
88^111.Gregory, D. (2008) The Rush to the Intimate:
Counterinsurgency and theCultural Turn in Late ModernWar, Radical
Philosophy 150: 8^23.Gregory, D. (2010a) War and Peace,
Transactions of the Institute of BritishGeographers 35:
154^86.Gregory, D. (2010b) Seeing Red: Baghdad and the Event-ful
City, PoliticalGeography 29: 266^79.Gregory, D. (2011) Doors into
Nowhere: Dead Cities and the Natural History ofDestruction, pp.
249^83 in M. Heffernan, P. Meusburger and E. Wunder (eds)Cultural
Memories. Heidelberg: Springer.Gros, F. (2010) States of Violence:
An Essay on the End of War, trans. K.Fi jalkowski and M.
Richardson. London: Seagull.Grossman, D. (1995) On Killing: The
Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill inWar and Society. NewYork:
Back Bay Books.Guernica, K. (2010) On the Frontlines ^ From 8,000
Miles Away, FOXnews.com,8 April.Harris, C. (2006) The Omniscient
Eye: Satellite Imagery, BattlespaceAwareness and the Structures of
the Imperial Gaze, Surveillance & Society 4(1/2):
101^22.Herbert, A. (2003) Compressing the Kill Chain, Air Force
Magazine 86(3):50^54.Hglund, J. (2008) Electronic Empire:
Orientalism Revisited in the MilitaryShooter, Game Studies 8(1),
URL (consulted September 2011):
http://gamestu-dies.org/0801/articles/hoeglund.
212 Theory, Culture & Society 28(7-8)
at University of British Columbia Library on September 3,
2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from
-
Human RightsWatch (2008) Troops in Contact: Airstrikes and
Civilian Deaths inAfghanistan.Washington, DC: Human
RightsWatch.Hyland,T. (2010) The Law of Instant Death,The Age, 21
February.Jay, M. (1988) Scopic Regimes of Modernity, pp. 3^23 in H.
Foster (ed.) Visionand Visuality. Seattle: Bay Press.Jean, G.V.
(2011) Broadcast Television Tools to Help Intelligence Analysts
Wadethrough Data, National Defense 95(688): 32^3.Judge Advocate
Generals School, Maxwell Air Force Base (2009) Air ForceOperations
and the Law: A Guide for Air, Space and Cyber Forces, 2nd edn),URL
(consulted September 2011): http://www.af
jag.af.mil/shared/media/docu-ment/AFD-100510-059.pdf.Kaplan, R.
(2006) Hunting the Taliban in Las Vegas, Atlantic
Monthly,September: 81^4.Kaplow, D. (2010) Death by Moderation: The
US Militarys Quest for UsableWeapons. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.Keen, F.S. (1923) To What Extent Would the Use of
the Latest Scientific andMechanical Methods of Warfare Affect
Operations on the North-West Frontier ofIndia?, Journal of the
United Service Institution of India 55.Kilcullen, D. and A. Exum
(2009) Death from Above, Outrage Down Below,NewYork Times, 16
May.Kurle, D. (2010) Lawyers Provide Operational Advice to
CAOCCommanders, USAir Forces Central Public Affairs, 9 March, URL
(consulted September
2011):http://www.afcent.af.mil/news/story.asp?id123193371.Lake, E.
(2010) Drone Footage Overwhelms Analysts, Washington Times,
9November.Lindlaw, S. (2008) UAVOperators SufferWar Stress,
Associated Press, 8 August.Logan, L. (2009) Drones: Americas New
Air Force, CBS News 60 Minutes, 14August.MacAskill, E. (2011) Two
US Soldiers Killed in Friendly-fire Drone Attack inAfghanistan,The
Guardian, 12 April.Martin, M.J. with C. Sasser (2010) Predator: The
Remote Control Air War overIraq and Afghanistan. Minneapolis, MN:
Zenith Press.Masters, C. (2005) Bodies of Technology: Cyborg
Soldiers and MilitarisedMasculinities, International Feminist
Journal of Politics 7: 112^32.Matthews,W. (2010) One Sensor to do
theWork of Many, Defense News, 1 March.Mayer, J. (2009) The
PredatorWar, NewYorker 26 October.McCloskey, M. (2009) TwoWorlds of
a Drone Pilot, Stars & Stripes, 27 October.Metz, C. (1982) The
Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Signifier.Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.Mitchell, W.J.T. (2011) Cloning Terror:
The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present.Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.Mulrine, A. (2008) Warheads on Foreheads, Air Force
Magazine 91(10): 44^47.Nakashima, E. (2011) Air Forces New
Surveillance System for Aerial Drones notWorking as
Hoped,Washington Post, 24 January.
Gregory ^ From a View to a Kill 213
at University of British Columbia Library on September 3,
2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from
-
Nakashima, E. and C. Whitlock (2011) With Air Forces New Drones,
We CanSee Everything,Washington Post, 2 January.OConnell, M.E.
(2009) Unlawful Killing with Combat Drones: A Case Study
ofPakistan, 2004^2009, Notre Dame Law School, Indiana, Legal
Studies ResearchPaper 09-43.Omissi, D. (1990) Air Power and
Colonial Control: The Royal Air Force 1919^1939. Manchester:
Manchester University Press.Orford, A. (2010) The Passions of
Protection: Sovereign Authority andHumanitarian War, pp. 335^56 in
D. Fassin and M. Pandolfi (eds)Contemporary States of Emergency:
The Politics of Military and HumanitarianInterventions. NewYork:
Zone Books.Owens, P. (2003) Accidents Dont Just Happen:The Liberal
Politics of High-tech-nology Humanitarian War, Millennium: Journal
of International Studies 32:595^616.Paust, J.J. (2009) Self-defense
Targeting of Non-state Actors and Permissibility ofU.S. Drones in
Pakistan, Public Law and Legal Theory series, University ofHouston,
2009-A-36.Phillips, M. (2010) Civilians in Cross-hairs Slow
Troops,Wall Street Journal, 21February.Roe, A. (2008) Friends in
High Places: Air Power on the North-West Frontier ofIndia, Air
Power Review 11(2): 30^42.Rogers, C. (2010), Civilian Harm and
Conflict in Northwest Pakistan.Washington, DC: Campaign for
Innocent Victims in Conflict.Royakkers, L. and R. van Est (2010)
The Cubicle Warrior: The Marionette ofDigitizedWarfare, Ethics Info
Tech 12: 289^96.Satia, P. (2008) Spies in Arabia: The Great War and
the Cultural Foundations ofBritains Covert Empire in the Middle
East. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Satia, P. (2009) From
Colonial Air Attacks to Drones in Pakistan, NewPerspectives
Quarterly 26(3): 34^7.Schanz, M. (2011) The Reaper Harvest, Air
Force Magazine 94(4): 36^9.Schmitt, M. (2004) Direct Participation
in Hostilities and Twenty-first-centuryArmed Conflict, pp. 502^29
in H. Fischer, U. Froissart, W. Heintschel vonHeinegg and C. Raap
(eds) Krisensicherung und Humanitrer Schutz ^ CrisisManagement and
Humanitarian Protection. Berlin: BWV.Schmitt, M. (2010)
Deconstructing Direct Participation in Hostilities: TheConstitutive
Elements, New York University Journal of International Law
andPolitics 42: 697^739.Shanker, T. (2008) Civilian Risks Curbing
Strikes in Afghan War, New YorkTimes, 23 July.Shanker, T. and M.
Richtel (2011) In New Military, Data Overload Can BeDeadly, NewYork
Times, 16 January.Singer, P. (2010) The Soldiers Call ItWar Porn,
Spiegel Online, 12 March.Smith, R. (2006) The Utility of Force: The
Art of War in the Modern World.London: Penguin.
214 Theory, Culture & Society 28(7-8)
at University of British Columbia Library on September 3,
2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from
-
Solis, G. (2010) CIA Drone Attacks Produce Americas Own
UnlawfulCombatants,Washington Post, 12 March.Somaini, A. (2005^6)
On the Scopic Regime, Leitmotiv 5: 25^38.Swift, D. (2010) Bomb
Proof, Financial Times, 4 September.Tirpak, J. (2009) Beyond
Reachback, Air Force Magazine, March.Turner, L.S., J.T. Adair and
L. Hamel (2009) Optimizing Deadly Persistence inKandahar: Armed UAV
Integration in the Joint Tactical Fight, Colloquium [USArmy and
Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center] 29: 1^19.Uecker, T. (2005)
Full-motion Video: The New Dimension of Imagery, ResearchReport,
Air Command and Staff College, Maxwell Air Force Base.United States
Air Force (2006) Targeting, USAF Doctrine Document 2-19
(8June).Vaccaro, J. (2009) The Next Surge: Counterbureaucracy, New
York Times, 8December.Virilio, P. (1989)War and Cinema:The
Logistics of Perception, trans. P. Camiller.London: Verso. (First
published in French in 1984.).Webb, D., L.Wirbel and B. Sulzman
(2010) From Space No One CanWatchYouDie, Peace Review 22:
31^9.Weizman, E. (2010) Thanato-tactics, pp. 543^73 in A. Ophir, M.
Givoni and S.Hanafi (eds) The Power of Inclusive Exclusion.
NewYork: Zone Books.West, B. (2011) TheWrongWar: Grit, Strategy and
theWay Out of Afghanistan.NewYork: Random House.White, R. (2010)
Gorgon Stare Broadens UAV Surveillance, Aviation Week,
3November.Zucchino, D. (2010) Drone Pilots Have a Front-row Seat on
War from Half aWorld Away, Los Angeles Times, 21 February.
Derek Gregory is Peter Wall Distinguished Professor at the
University ofBritish Columbia in Vancouver. He is completing a new
book, TheEverywhereWar, on the conduct of war in the shadows of
9/11, and his cur-rent research is a cultural and political history
of bombing, focusing on theSecond World War, the air wars over
Indochina and todays drone wars.[email:
[email protected]]
Gregory ^ From a View to a Kill 215
at University of British Columbia Library on September 3,
2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from